Waterfalls and canyons

Last weekend my friend Faye and I went “canyoning,” through a company called Canyons. I’d previously done something similar to this in Puerto Rico, but that course was labeled as “rappelling.”

Here I am with Nivi during our rappelling excursion in Puerto Rico:

I absolutely loved the rappelling tour, and perhaps more importantly, I felt like I was actually really good at it. After we got back to the US I was like “Yeah! I’m gonna go rappelling all the time, and jump around from rock to rock, and climb up waterfalls…” And…it didn’t happen, of course! Silly me. But really, I’ve been wanting to do something like it again, and so when Faye suggested canyoning, I figured it would be pretty similar. Here’s Faye and I canyoning:

The first thing you might notice is that the gear is totally different! Basically the only similarity is the helmets. For canyoning, everything was provided by the company, the helmet, wetsuit, harness, shoes, gloves, and life jacket. For rappelling, we only got a helmet and a harness, because there were a couple of moments when we needed to be latched onto something. That’s not to say we weren’t safe with rappelling, it’s just that we were never in heavy flowing water, and it was extremely hot so the cool water felt excellent. I’m glad we had the wetsuits for canyoning because I would have definitely been freezing without it.

For rappelling, we also only ever climbed UP waterfalls, but for canyoning we slid down them! Most of them were just like real life water slides, but one was actually straight down a very, very vertical waterfall. That was pretty intense!

Do you want to see some videos? Of course! (I wish there was one of sliding down a waterfall, but unfortunately there isn’t.)

The tour was fantastic and I totally recommend it if you ever make your way to Gunma in Japan. Faye and I both agree we should have done the full day tour as opposed to the half day one, because it was so much fun!